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A few years ago I visited an extremely vulnerable man in Tinsley
House. Weeks later I received a phone call saying that he had thrown himself against a wall and broken his own neck.
When I read that sentence back again it still shocks me and brings back
memories that I wish I did not have. The next time I saw this man, who I will
call John, it was in East Surrey Hospital, a few miles from Gatwick Airport,
where I found him lying paralysed in a hospital bed. Today he still lies
paralysed, requiring 24 hour care, and he will of course never recover. While
this is an extreme example of what can happen to people when they are locked up
indefinitely, it shows what is possible in these circumstances, and shines a
light on how the system of immigration detention in the UK is failing those who
are most vulnerable to its effects.

Tinsley House is often considered to be one of the better
immigration removal centres in the UK. Successive reports by Her Majesty’s
Inspectorate of Prisons are largely positive, there have been no deaths at the
centre, unlike at many others, nor have there been any major disturbances. Many
of those we work with who have experienced life in more than one centre tell us
Tinsley is better than most, and certainly far better than its bigger sister at
Gatwick, Brook
House. My experience of visiting there on many occasions over the last
seven years is that many of the staff who work there are caring and
compassionate, and see their job very much as making the stays of those held
there are bearable as possible. And yet incidents like the one that happened
with John still occur. The underlying problem, therefore, lies not in the
conditions, nor the quality of the staff, nor the regime, though all of these
are important and affect how many people deal with their detention. The problem
is with a system which says it is OK to lock people up for the convenience of
the state, while they make what is often very slow
progress in resolving each person’s case, often with seemingly scant regard
for the risks that this may pose to each individual, nor any effective way of
ensuring that each person is not damaged to the extent that suicide seems like
the only way out.

Tinsley House. Photo: Corporate Watch

John was quite clearly struggling in detention when I saw
him, and I was very concerned that he was seriously mentally
unwell. He had been in Tinsley House for a few weeks, and in another
immigration removal centre before that. I remember him telling me how desperate
he was to return back to his home country where his wife and children had returned
a few months earlier. He told me all he wanted was to go back home, but that
there was a conspiracy by the Home Office to keep him locked up forever. He was
paranoid, angry and desperate. I found out later that John had suffered from
mental health problems since childhood. I had never seen anyone in such a
condition before, and was so worried about his mental state that I informed the
centre’s medical staff about my concerns, which is something I have only done
on a handful of occasions before or since. While some action was taken by the
staff at the centre, unfortunately they were unable to prevent the tragedy that
unfolded a few days later. At a hearing many years later, the Judge found that
negligence on behalf of both individuals at the centre and by the security firm
who ran the centre were contributing factors; but he also found that John was
so highly disturbed by that stage that nothing they could have done within the
centre could have stopped him from doing what he did.

What does this say about our system of detention? Does it
say that it is OK to lock up a man who did not even want to stay in the UK for
months on end, simply for bureaucratic
convenience, and even while his mental health deteriorated so severely and
so clearly that when I got the call to say that he had broken his own neck it
did not come as a great surprise to me?

My own experience of visiting and supporting hundreds of people
in immigration detention over the years is that many, particularly the most
vulnerable, of which John was undoubtedly one, are kept locked up for reasons
that are very hard to fathom. The usual arguments of risk of absconding and
risk of reoffending frequently make little sense when put under the spotlight;
people who have committed documents offences or who have been caught working
illegally being regarded as a potential risk to the public, men who have never
failed to miss a ‘reporting
date’ being considered a high risk of absconding. The people who make these
decisions have often never met those whose immediate fate they hold in their
hands, have little information to go on when making decisions about whether to
detain or release, and when it comes to vulnerabilities and the ongoing harm
being caused by detention there is often no information at all. The futility of
detaining people for no discernible reason, for periods of time that often
stretch into months
and sometimes into years and on the basis of information that is incomplete
at best, is clear to anyone who works with detainees. But not, it seems, to the
Home Office, who continue to detain more and more people each year, and this
year for the first time broke the 5,000 bed spaces mark, across IRCs, short-term
holding facilities and prisons.

There has to be a better way. To treat vulnerable people
with seemingly little regard for the damage that is being inflicted upon them
is at best immoral, at worst inhuman. I have witnessed torture
survivors being seriously re-traumatised by their detention, people so
mentally ill that they had little idea of where they were and no idea of what
was happening to them, and I have lost count of the number of people who tell
me they could see no
way out other than suicide.

While of course this is not the fate of the
vast majority, that does not mean that we can just assume that they will
probably be OK in the end. Assessing someone’s mental health is extremely
difficult, and I am by no means a clinician, but you do not have to be a
psychiatrist to know if a person sitting opposite you in the visits room is suffering
beyond what is reasonable. Our immigration control system cannot be based on
compassion alone, but it can be more understanding of those who are
most vulnerable, and it can be much better at identifying those who are being
unreasonably harmed by being locked up. Better decisions are possible.

'Whisper' by M. Photo: Detention Action

The Vulnerable
People Working Group of the Detention
Forum, a network of 30 NGOs seeking to reform immigration detention in the
UK, are calling for the development of a vulnerability assessment tool. This is
based on other systems that are currently in use by the Scottish
Refugee Council among others, albeit in a non-detention setting. This not
only gives a much more rounded approach to vulnerability, bringing in a range
of factors not currently considered, but is also able to track how this changes
over time. We are calling on the government to investigate this as a matter of
urgency. The right tool will benefit everyone. The Home Office will waste far
less money detaining those who are most vulnerable, who often end up being
released, and who often end up successfully taking them to court for unlawful
detention. The benefits for those whose lives risk being shattered by detention
need no explanation. Ample evidence is given on the pages of this Unlocking
Detention series on openDemocracy.

Today John once again lies in a bed in a care home. Another
day passes him by, unable to move, reliant on the staff to keep him alive. This
is the real cost of detention.

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